Be Realistic About Worklife Balance...

Talk about worklife balance. In fact, there has been some behavourial changes from some industries that it is more apt these days to call it worklife integration. Employees or HR practitioners should go easy when dishing out philosophy in how employers should support this.

While there are distinct differences between business owners and pure employees, managing worklife for the former can be brutal. And for individuals thinking of being an entrepreneur, putting in more than the conventional number of work hours daily and weekly might be a key differentiator among other traits, to stay being one.

Here is a snippet in what worklife as an entrepreneur/employee could be in technology companies from places such as Silicon Valley, Palo Alto...

Pumps in 50 to 90 hours per week (sometimes, there is no differentiation whether it is Saturday and Sunday)

10 hours of meeting once a week, in one to two sittings

Long hours of meeting is preferred so as to avoid wasting time on a series of meetings (this is quite contrary to the school of thought where each meeting should be kept as short as possible)

No phones and laptops allowed during meetings (this is harder to do in a lengthy meeting context)

Working and serving in more than one organisation (it would be good to have two different work places within walking distance to save time)

Worklife issues can be an emotive subject, debate in this never ends. Each side of the table has sound arguments about working long (or short) hours. (Except in cases where employees just clocked long hours for the sake of showing their immediate managers as most seen during the 1980s and in major Japanese work culture)

Facebook is rewarding employees to stay near its office. Why? The noble cause is the greater social effort by Facebook to help minimise cost impact to communities living around or near its HQ office. A more plausible or less 'BS' reason is to allow employees to reduce travelling time to their workplace and for Facebook to save on transportation cost.